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I had a bad sales month last month. After a handful of losses on a Wednesday evening, I cried. What a wimp, I know. After a brief moment of utter disbelief and hurt I wiped the tears away and took a step back to reflect. What did I do wrong, what did I do differently from the previous month? For those who have lost a big deal or are just in a sales slump here is the breakdown that may assist in your sales ventures.

Step One: Stop Crying Ya Baby

Me Circa 1994

It’s only a deal not the end of the world. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try again. Take each loss with a grain of salt. Start with each step of the sales process – critically think about the conversations you had and the process of each sale. Start over and try new approaches on your next sale.

Step Two: Care about your prospects

Did you take at least 5-10 minutes to research that individual or that company? Do it now. Jump on Linkedin and get after it. Improve your cold emails with a touch of personalization, insight and value.

When prospecting, do some research and find something interesting to reference about a client before calling them and use that as an intro. When meeting with clients, ask open ended insightful questions that put them in the position to be an expert. — John Barrows

Beyond the research, how are those emails performing? Are you monitoring analytics around the types of messaging that resonates to each customer?

Best Practice: Use Tout to get more insight around how successful your day to day emails are. Check out the engagement on this puppy…

Benchmark your templates to get above industry standard.

Rough average: 20% open rate & 5% click rate

Step Three: Be Smarter about your Follow-Up

It sounds so simple. So easy and it is. Just follow up. Following up can be the most underrated piece of the sales process. You have more than enough leads you can handle how do you balance follow up and remember all the customer specifics? Be smarter about your follow up, time follow up and make sure you are consistently hitting them up every 3 – 4 days. I’d recommend leveraging auto follow ups with Tout. Best Practice: I got this one from Doug Landis @ the Sales Hackers conference. Track everything. Track the messaging you are using and track the responses you get through email and over the phone. Track and learn what is working and what needs to be refined.

Step Four: Be Human

This is what we live by at ToutApp, our mantra. We solve real life problems for salespeople. We teach first and then we sell.

Step Five: Zip it and Listen

Want to get off the phone with a prospect and have them think “Wow, what a great call”? You must LISTEN. I will be the first to admit, I love to talk. Who doesn’t want to talk about themselves. But the more you listen, the more you learn, the more you can critically think about how you are going to solve the customers issues they have articulated on the that call. Take notes. You want your prospects to adore you, trust you and respect you… shut up and listen.

Recently, I was on an important call with our Chief Happiness Officer, TK. He, taught me something so incredibly powerful that the average company may lose sight of. He said, “Let’s forget about Tout, let’s talk about what you need to make your customer/team successful – what can we do to help them?” Or even ask your potential client the simple question, “What’s important for you right now?” You should never sell first. You teach, you listen and you build trust so your potential customer will want to partner with you. You are there to solve a real person’s issue at that moment.

Step Six: Promote Success and Happiness Above All

Sure – you are in sales, you should be selling. But what is selling without creating some type of success and happiness for the buyer? Customer success and happiness is key to your success. If your existing customers are not happy – you are doing it all wrong my friend. Keep in touch, check in, send a birthday card or company t-shirt.

Keep an honest relationship with your customer. Happy customers will bring you a long term partnership and potentially add-on sales. If your customer is successful then you are successful.

Step Seven: Don't Give Up

Failure is just your judgement on an experience, because there are no failures, just learning opportunities. — Aaron Ross

The most successful salespeople learn from their mistakes and improve year after year. Learn from your bad days. Always try to be better, be the best of what you do whether you are selling carpet or an email solution.. give it all you got.

When they’re not busy powering the internet, Dyn’s business development and marketing teams use Tout to improve their emails.

Tout is great for “reaching out to existing customers… Since there are wayyyyyyy more customers than there are BDRs, it helps us keep in contact with them all and inform them of other offerings Dyn has.” – AJ Garron, Business Development Rep

As a very customer-centric company (we’ve written about Dyn’s credo and how they put the customer first here), the Dyn team use ToutApp to stay in touch with more customers while keeping the conversation personal. Our templates save the team time re-writing the same communications, and email tracking kicks in to make sure that Dyn’s reps are engaging with the most interested customers.

“Our team loves using ToutApp. Efficiency and 'working smart' are some of our credos here at Dyn, and ToutApp is a major tool to help promote both of them. It's a great connection tool that we use every day.' – John Zahr, Business Development Manager

“ToutApp is a great tool to not only learn how effective you are at first impressions, but also increase the number of first impressions you can achieve in a work day. It makes your emails more about the customers, rather than yourself using its customized templates. If there is one tool in your marketing and sales teams’ hands that is fist pump worthy…this is it.” -Ryan O'Hara, Event Marketing

Tout’s offerings not only help Dyn send out a larger quantity of emails, they also improve the quality of them. Template analytics keep the team on top of their game by letting them know how effective each email is. Not only does Tout help Dyn succeed as a business, it lets them give their customers more of the information they want.

In fact, if you’re a Tout customer looking for your own email servers to send from, we definitely recommend that you check Dyn out. Existing Tout users can set up SMTP with them here.

A Tale of Two Teams

Two teams at competing companies sign up for a productivity app. Both are large, aggresive sales teams with big budgets and overlapping products. One of them takes full advantage of the app's collaboration features with tons of management buy-in; the other team is unable to be truly be transparent and collaborative and suffers from lack of leadership. So who wins? Which company is ultimately more successful?

You know the answer as well as I do: the more collaborative team. In the end, though, it’s really easy to recognize this as a successful model, but it’s really difficult to act on it. At a past employer, I struggled through a corporate job at a major tech company where this was the case; there were many complaints about a lack of internal transparency, but no one really stood up to change this. In the end, though, this is a detrimental cycle that only hurts you, the company, and your job.

Ultimately, it all comes down to this: someone has to either step up to reshape corporate culture to be more transparent, or the company will flounder.

The latest shake-ups at Yahoo are a clear example of this: the company floundered under weak leadership; now, the appointment of a new CEO has led the company in a far more decisive direction. The decision to “open the kimono” and really communicate across the team doesn’t just lie with management. Each employee has the choice of whether they want to get candid, and this can have far-reaching effects.

Sales Teams Need to Communicate – Here's Why

Sales is an especially challenging arena to be transparent in. It’s a department that’s traditionally based on competition. But the best salespeople out there can’t just be competitive – they need to be team players. Each salesperson brings a unique strength to the table – whether it be an insight into messaging that works, a secret to better prospecting, or a wealth of connections in their personal network. Uniting these strengths together is what makes a sales team unstoppable and their company more successful.

I see a ton of startups and smaller companies taking huge, huge advantage of our team collaboration features. It’s the larger companies that struggle with a sense of appropriateness, openness, and clear leadership. And, ultimately, the ones who are able to behave with a truly transparent attitude are the ones that will differentiate themselves from the competition.

So go ahead and share a “secret” or best practice with your boss or coworker. Help teach them something they didn't already know. Pass on your knowledge and talk frankly. You're not creating competition for yourself or giving anything away – you're helping your company and becoming a leader.

One of the biggest draws of our Salesforce plugin is that it lets you do all of your email outreach right from within Salesforce while ensuring your emails still get sent through your own email servers.

Once you've installed Tout from the AppExchange, Our Tout Outbox lets you see email analytics in Salesforce, and our “Email with Tout” button lets you send emails with Salesforce templates and tracking. ToutApp will also auto-BCC Salesforce on all your communications, even when you're emailing from Gmail or Outlook.

And now ToutApp for Salesforce is even more powerful, because we'll display email tracking and engagement information whenever you pull up a Lead or Contact.

So for those salespeople who live within Salesforce and can’t imagine needing to navigate away to look up email tracking information, we’ve got your back. Here's what our newest tracking info in Salesforce looks like:

For current Salesforce users, here's a video explaining how to update your Salesforce plugin to the latest version with additional tracking:

Also, if you're looking to take your sales communciations in Salesforce to the next level, here's a book we wrote with the 5 top best practices on how to make the most of Salesforce + Tout.

ToutApp's Email Templates and Tracking coupled with Salesforce CRM makes a killer combination for your sales team. In this book, we've put together five best practices on how to make the most of your sales communications process with Salesforce and Tout:

We can make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. — Winston Churchill

Its a lesser known fact that we never started out building ToutApp to be a sales productivity tool or a email analytics platform. We never imagined that the software we build would end up helping salespeople be better at their jobs or marketing and sales work better together. Although we’ve grown up to do a lot of these things and are slowly becoming the leading provider of Sales Email Analytics, we started this company nearly two years ago with one simple goal: help people communicate better.

In that spirit, we’re more excited than ever to introduce the Tout for Tout program so that we can take helping people and helping people communicate to a whole new level.

Introducing Tout for Tout

Although the majority of our paying customers and our user base (we don’t consider those two things the same thing) are businesses and business professionals, we’ve always recognized that nonprofits could greatly benefit from our platform as well.

But many nonprofits lack the resources and tools to take that extra step after they have hit send on their emails. They’re often run by volunteers that require re-training, have budgets that can’t always justify the fanciest tools and more importantly, can always use more help.

How does Tout for Tout work?

For Every ToutApp Enterprise Edition Sold, we’ll donate ToutApp, for free, to a nonprofit interested in improving their email communications and productivity.

We hope this model spreads to more startups

The “Tout for Tout” program is about taking our platform and making it available to the types of organizations that can’t necessary spend the big bucks but are out there every day actuating positive change in this world.

And its not about just our software either. Our Happiness Officers and Engineers have also pledged part of their time to help these nonprofits make use of these tools as well. We’re super excited about this program and we hope that over time this type of model gets adopted by other startups as well.

Ever wonder what happens after you hit the “Send” button on your emails? Some of them are deleted without being opened while others never make it past the spam filter. Without a standard reply or a response to your “Hey, did you get my earlier email…?,” you're blind to your recipients’ actions.

“Sending an important email without Tout feels like operating my business in the dark.”

– Forest Linden

Wondering whether your important emails have been received is a pain, but multiply that tenfold when you're running your own company. We had two founders of their own businesses weigh in on this topic: Forest Linden, the founder of Tech Husband, who doles out advice and training around web tools; and Matt Cooper, the Founder and CEO at Addroid, a platform that creates streamlined, affordable video banner ads. Forest and Coop both weighed in on how Tout has helped them stop worrying about email responses so they can start working on what's important: running their business.

Before Tout

FL: If 24 hours elapsed between when I sent an important email and getting no response from someone, I would start to get concerned that they didn't get it, and if a day and a half or two days went by with no response from them, I would send out another email to touch base and make sure they got the first email.

MC: Basically I was just sending regular emails out into the abyss and then days later would just think, “I wonder if that guy got my email? Should I try him again? I wonder if he saw the link I sent? Maybe I should call? Nah, that's crazy. Could I email again to check? Maybe I'll follow up with a quick note, but I wonder if I'm just bothering him at this point?” I'd pretty much go back and forth like this.

After Tout

MC: As the CEO of a new startup I find myself working many different roles. While I enjoy working on the product, I realize that it's not much good if no one hears about it. So, for the time being I'm the lead sales person, and I'm having to get up to speed on the process of sales and the tools of the trade… What I was really struggling with was sending and following up on emails. Tout has helped me dramatically increase the amount of prospecting I can do in a day and now I finally know if I'm getting though.

FL: With ToutApp, the entire worry cycle is gone because I can see if they opened my email… Since I can see whether or not they viewed it and how long they had it open for, I know when people have read an email, and now I can relax and give them a few days before I follow up.That allows me to focus on other important aspects of running my business, rather than wasting energy worrying and sending out second emails to see if people got the first one.

To find out what's working and what isn't working with your inside sales efforts you need to be able to measure the results. Tout solves this one problem and does it well.

– Matt Cooper

You can learn more about how Tout satisfies your curiosity with email analytics here.